The diagram is what I decided would be the best way to present my findings. I did conduct in person interviews, online surveys and in depth recursive research on both biased and nonbiased sources. I intend for it to be ‘non denominational’ and not apply to any one religion or faith.

I was asked if I understood religion differently now that I have looked at it this way. My response was a new definition for religion:

“Religion is a system for living that operates behind a shield of the unknown”

The unknown could be any version of God, Enlightenment, the mysteries of life, etc.

I do not by any means declare this a finished work. Even though I have already presented it to my class and instructor, I am not satisfied with the product and I aim to improve it. I do welcome any and all input (put into the comments section of this post) to the following:

• Initial Reactions
• Final Reactions
• Feelings
• Anything I missed
• Errors
• Thoughts on what can be done to improve it (I can go into a lot of detail about each branch)

  Purpose of Religion Diagram Page Best viewed on a PC with Internet Explorer. I made the diagram with Microsoft Visio 2007 as a Mind Map.

  For MACs and FireFox junkies I saved it as a JPG for you. Purpose of Religion Diagram.

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The essay itself can be somewhat boring but the concept of forcing an evolution on Democracy because we are able to is exciting. Concepts and ideas are born everyday, but how often do you see a good one that will work?

If you would like to read the petition click here

 If you would like to read the essay

 

Campaign Advertising is Misrepresenting America

Campaign Advertising and elections have become too much of a celebrity contest and too little about representation. For too long, voters have felt they are voting for the lesser of two evils and not for someone who even partly represents their ideals. Campaign Advertising should have a predetermined start date, prior to that a public forum held where the public puts forth questions they want answered by the candidates. In order to begin a campaign, a candidate should first answer all the public’s questions and, if elected, abide by their answers or be impeached. This law would bring better representation to the people and move our government further away from the theatrical show it is today.

“Fully half of all political commercials emphasize the weaknesses of the opposing candidates rather the strengths of the sponsors.” (Going Negative, 90). The effect of this negative campaigning is polarizing the electorate and slowly drawing us away from our democratic principles. A study of campaign ads during the Bush vs Kerry campaigns of 2004 found that “Advertisements are informative and not manipulative, but they are dividing voters into more and more partisan camps.” This means that less of what the general public wants is being stood up for and more of what party leaders want is being represented. The authors also state “negative advertisements…are shrinking the electorate, especially the non-partisan…As the independents in the middle stop voting, the partisans…dominate electoral politics.” (Going Negative10)

This is definitely a problem for America, a nation partly founded on the invention of ideas. Each camp has its own goals in mind and with big money to back them up, smaller Independent candidates have less of a chance to invigorate and infuse new ways of thinking into our political system. This habit of negative campaigning “alienates people…and actually depresses intentions to participate in the electoral process.” (Going Negative 101)

Without intervention from the public this practice will continue. It is condoned and encouraged by campaign managers and in books written to assist potentials in winning elections. In Winning Politics there is a whole chapter dedicated to attack strategy. The author, William Roper, states the principle that “The average man does not vote for something, but against something…every candidate needs a whipping boy…a target of the voter’s wrath” (Roper 69). He even goes so far as to eloquently paraphrase the practice as a “well-documented expose based on truth”. Are we, as voters, electing representation or are we simply picking sides in a fight?

The nature of these ads creates disparity between parties, divides the electorate, polarizes voters, and even affects voter turnout. This is a direct, domestic threat to the democracy of our society. The ‘bipartisan’ have become a ‘biarchy’. The old saying “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” stands true. Human civilization has existed in many forms and sizes for well over 10,000 years, what does it say about us if we still have corruption and greed in our ‘civil servants’ to this day?

To propose a proper solution, a deeper analysis of the anatomy of an ad is in order. According to Ingrid Reed of the NJBIZ Journal, there are three main types of campaign ads; attack ads, advocacy ads and contrast ads (Reed). Attack ads are too well known for shooting at the opponent. Advocacy ads show the support a candidate has from other officials. Contrast ads highlight the difference between two candidates points of view on a subject. Campaign Ads serve the purpose of selling the Candidate, the product, to the people so when Election Day comes; they purchase or in some cases not vote at all.

Since marketing is a war fought on many fronts, campaign ads, like product advertising, come in different flavors. One of the focuses is to promote integrity in the candidate so individuals feel the candidate is a product they can trust. Many campaign ads attack the integrity of the opponent, called ‘Negative Campaigning’; they aim to win the vote by exposing the negative aspects of the opponent rather than focus on one’s own character.

In Twenty Ads That Shook the World, James B. Twitchell wrote about the evolution of contemporary advertising from its religious beginnings. Now, we are led through images of happy, healthy people enjoying their day to believe that new car or even a fast food restaurant is going to change our life for the better. “What we really crave is not just material, but material with meaning. The process of instilling meaning into…goods is called commercialism. Advertising is at the heart of commercialism.” (Twitchell 10).

 “You can still see the religious roots of commercialism in advertising. Buy this object and you’ll be saved…You are in good hands. Trust in us.” (Twitchell 11). It began with the selling of holy or blessed objects to common people, who purchased these objects to create a better feeling about themselves, their life, or the afterlife. Campaigns treat the candidate as a product and the voter as the consumer.

All the elements of typical product advertising can be seen in campaign advertising; incentives are offered, deadlines, even the ‘what do you have to lose’ guarantees (Klein 63). One of the first well-known attack ads was run for Lyndon B Johnson against Barry Goldwater. The commercial starts with a little girl picking petals off a flower while she counts backwards, the camera zooms in closer to her eye until the screen blackens as her voice fades to that of mission control “3…2…1…” then the unforgettable mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion fills the screen followed by the words “Vote for President Johnson…or else” (Twitchell 154).

The ad was a direct response to Goldwater’s firm opposition of Communism and other threats. Years later, Jane Hall of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Bill Moyers, the ad’s creator, about his thoughts on the efficacy of the ad:

“I regret that we were in on the first wave of the future. The ad was intended to remind voters of Johnson’s prudence; it wasn’t meant to make you think Barry Goldwater was a war monger…It haunts me all this time that Johnson was portrayed as the peacemaker…but he committed the country to a long, bloody war in Vietnam” (Hall 1989, 4 as quoted by Twitchell 160)

In How to Win a Local Election, Lawrence Grey instructs would-be politicians to put themselves in front of people, in person or image, as positively as possible, as many times as possible. This strategy tends to tilt the vote to the candidates favor, even if the ad is not about the hopeful and is geared more towards portraying the opponent in the negative. This has proven useful to Bush in his campaign against Kerry in 2004. According to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the “more Bush ads people have seen, the more likely they are to agree that Kerry flip-flops and that Bush is strong and decisive.” (Events Overshadow).

However, what about Bush’s integrity? Strong and decisive does not make an honest man. Before Bush’s first term, he said, “I’ve never lived in Washington in my life.” In 1987, he and his family lived in DC so he could help with his father’s campaign (Waldman 3). Further, Bush Jr. described his father as “a Connecticut Yankee, but I’m a real Texan”, when in reality Bush Jr. attended a public junior high for one year before attending an “elite private school in Houston, followed by his high school years at Andover.” (Waldman 11). Bush claims to be a regular American, yet creatively, with the help of his father’s connections, managed to skip serving in Vietnam. (Waldman 23).

It should be apparent by now that candidates are pushed like products and the American Consumer buys readily, blindly. Political Candidates are not products and should not be portrayed as such. Campaign advertising should not follow the normal method of traditional consumer advertising. Campaigns should be held to a standard and as such, the candidate, if elected, should also be held accountable for any obvious or major transgressions of integrity. Democracy is about representation of the people, not the powerful.

Technology finally enables us to shift focus from the Popularity contest to a contest of the Truth. How well will Candidate A represent John Q Public? Campaign season should have a set date to start, a set period before that day public forums would be held and the public would have a chance to put forth issues that they want the candidates to respond to. In order to campaign, each candidate would first have to respond with his or her take on all the issues. These responses would be publicly available en toto. This anti-disinformation would allow the voter to be better educated on which candidate is going to better represent their way of life.

Further, negative attack ads should be limited to less than 25% of a campaign and less than half of each commercial spot. For example, in a 30 second commercial, only 15 fifteen seconds could be allotted to negative portrayal of the opponent and the sponsor would have to provide his or her own contrast to the subject. For each instance that a candidate is in breach of this would result in one day that their ads would be restricted from the media beginning one day before Election Day and working backwards. This anti-negativity act would encourage more eligible voters to take an interest in the candidates and not feel dirty for doing so.

Politics has become the Anti-Christ of Truth. Beginning with campaign advertising, candidates treat the public as consumers, wooing votes out of them by touching on a few ‘emotional issues’ and less on the dirty grit that plagues our society. By changing the standards to which we hold our representation to a higher degree we are not restricting their rights, we are squeezing the truth out of the candidates, and in the long run our society can only benefit from this change. Please sign the attached petition to propose new standards on candidates and end this insanity.

Petition to Evolve the Democratic Process.

Democracy needs to evolve. Technology enables us to do this. Currently, Candidates are pushed on the public like products and are less about representation. This petition is to support a new law governing Campaigns and Campaign Advertising.

Democracy needs to evolve. Technology enables us to do this. Currently, Candidates are pushed on the public like products and are less about representation. This petition is to support a new law governing Campaigns and Campaign Advertising.

Specific components of the new law will be:

1. Campaigns will have a set start date.
2. A limit will be imposed on the percentage of negative campaigning that can exist in a campaign.
3. Before the campaign start dates, public forums will be held where the public, eligible to vote or not, puts forth questions to be answered by the candidates.
4. A Standards Committee consisting of non-governmental citizens will be assembled via the Jury Duty process to summarize the majority of the public’s questions. The committee also sets an allowable deviation for each question.
5. In order to begin campaigning, candidates must answer all the questions forwarded by the Standard’s Committee.
6. The questions and answers will be readily accessible to the public.
7. If, after being elected, a candidate deviates, more than allowed by the committee, from their answers they are immediately held for an impeachment trial and breach of representation.

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 Thank you and without further ado

 
The Truth Can Change

When a person, or a people, hold to the truth of our existence, our natural freedoms, their actions benefit humankind as an icon of true integrity. It is our actions, born of and in reaction to our words, concepts, perspectives, and personal relativistic truths that necessitate attention, for the ones that stray from our personal and social freedoms are those that tarnish our existence. Those that remain loyal to the truth, in their search for reality, have unwittingly engineered a brighter future for all of humankind. Using the truth of freedom as a tool, one can reinvestigate their ethics and cast aside those found wanting and drive on to a brighter future.

Freedom as a philosophy can be defined as “an absence of external restraints…not subjugated”.  Freedom can be defined as inner autonomy as well and further broken down into four sub definitions:
• The ability to act in accordance with the dictates of reason;
• …with one’s own true self or values;
• …with universal values (such as the True and the Good);
• The ability to act independently of the dictates of reason and the urges of desire (wikipedia)

Furthermore, freedom can be the encompassing concept of free will. In philosophical discussions about free will, much is said about determinism, indeterminism, compatibilism and incompatibilism, and whether or not we ultimately have a choice in our actions or whether that choice was predetermined by past events. Lawmakers and citizens avoid this argument and weigh their individual freedoms against the laws of the many, deciding how much of a freedom can be safely relinquished in exchange for greater security or advancement of culture.

An example of such weighing is Proposition 201 on the ballot for Arizona’s 2006 election year (AZSOS). It raises taxes on cigarettes, bans public smoking, and gives the monies from the fines levied to a fund that simply educates people on the danger of smoking. Every American is afforded the liberty to live in their own way and care for their body as they seem fit. This particular law is an example of how the wants of many oppress the few. It is without question that public smoking offends and irritates non-smokers but a better law can been written that does not isolate and harass a single group. Perhaps instead of putting the funds into education on smoking hazards it can be put towards a Smoking Cessation program.

Dr. David Hawkins measures truth on a scale from 1 to 1000, with 1000 being the highest and the absolute truth itself (68). The closer a statement or person is to the truth the higher a score. In Patten’s book, Truth, Knowledge or Just Plain Bull, he suggests that “People who wish to influence you…adjust what they have to say to the intellectual level of their audience. And the larger the audience, the lower the level” (21). From these two statements we can extrapolate that the further we are from the object of discussion, the more likely the facts have been misconstrued and the more falsification has occurred.

In today’s media, news teams strive to have a reporter on the scene, an eyewitness, and as much video footage as possible, to buy as much credibility as possible. In many ways, this brings a person closer to the truth of the subject. However, there are many variables that blur the lines between fact and fiction: the reporter’s point of view, the witnesses’ perception, the angle of the video footage, etc. Last and not least there is a person’s own personal perception AND awareness of the aforementioned variables.

In lawmaking, the laws themselves are written in such a way that a common layperson finds difficulty in grasping the overall concept, let alone the intricate details. Some governments find themselves with an analysis committee whose sole obligation is to paraphrase the law itself. Further, proponents and opponents of a law offer their own points of view and often even more valuable fourth dimensional analysis (in reference to time, extrapolation of what will happen in the future).

A citizen can find themselves at odds when election time comes around with all the different language used to describe proposed laws. Very few texts of proposed laws contain a comprehensive, honest evaluation of the proposition’s effect on the different levels including individual, group, class, community, city, county, state, government, business, etc. Assuming that a citizen found themselves with a clear description of the laws effect on the previous items, each individual’s perception still filters against the truth.

Alcoholics Anonymous offers many principles in which an alcoholic or addict can change their lives and recover. “Recovery” can be defined as a return to an original state. If the truth was warped, twisted, misconstrued, and misperceived then there is a calling for principles on which to recover the truth on the individual level. A few of the principles offered by AA to accelerate recovery are ‘open-mindedness’ and ‘willingness’ (59).

Faced with possible untruths a person exercising open-mindedness and the willingness to hear different sides of a story is far more likely to make a better decision overall. To raise the level of truth in relation to a subject, one should gather as much varied information as possible. One should never assume that their local club, chapter, or favorite organization makes the best decisions or has the best sources and should always opt to hear the other side’s point of view.

Bernard Patten offers a principle on how a person can deduce the truth from many sources including statements, transcripts, news spots, etc. “Usually, there are no simple answers because there are few simple problems. On the contrary, most of the problems we must face…are quite complex” (14) is a principle offered by Patten for one to deduce the following lesson: “Because there are no simple answers, a simple answer is likely to be wrong.” He goes on to describe the reason people tend to believe simple statements about complex issues is ““People want to believe that there are simple answers. And because of that will to believe, time and time again, they are duped.”

To further hone one’s wit, he goes on to state “Most people tend to take the easy way.” and explains the countering lesson “Avoid mental laziness. Work at thinking…Cure yourself of mental laziness by resolving…to force yourself to think ” (19).

Technology has freed us on many levels. At a moments notice a person can post a personal decree from the back seat of a taxi, to a website viewed by millions. In many ways, our generation is faced with information overload and in a survivalist response mechanism this generation has begun to tune out. “Generation Y workers have a reputation for experiencing boredom and frustration with slow-paced environments.” (eWeek.com) According to Jill Geisler, each successive generation has become more open-minded as time passes, forcing previous surviving generations to open their minds as well.

Moving closer to the truth is one of the driving forces of our cultural evolution. In 1895, Thomas Bayard wrote, “Evolution, not revolution, is the quiet masterful force now leading the progress of a civilization” (43) It is imperative for a being of any reasonable intellect to maintain truth in their own minds as well as in their dealings with others. One should never summaries of important issues, or much for that matter, at face value. One should always question if an issue’s proposed solutions hold true to humankind’s inherent freedoms.

Dr Hawkins describes the level of truth of humankind as rising as time passes. In light of all events that have transpired on this planet, is it not evident that our species is marching towards a freer, truer unified society than at any other time in history? It is finally evident that the intense, determined preservation of freedom and an untiring search for the truth are vital to the success and evolution of our species.

The closer to the truth a person stands, the clearer the picture is of how it affects them and others. The truth is an essential ingredient in human freedom and in self-governance; the truth is the most vital part of our government. This truth forces an evolution of our society. When reading this, one should be open-minded and willing to consider the total effect these variables have on one’s own life and perception. In order to make educated decisions one must first educate oneself with the truth.